This BLOG is for tracking successful and un successful Internet research trips and techniques as they relate to finding my ancestors. I hope to help others who also search for their ancestors by sharing my strategies here.

Subscribe To 'Tis All Relative

Wednesday, May 16, 2012

Organizing Bookmarks and Favorites

Keeping track of the websites I use for genealogy has become
a real PAIN. I tried setting bookmarks and favorites but if I were not at my
home computer, then I did not have them. Some browsers let you synchronize the
bookmarks across multiple computers but not all computers I use have Google
Chrome or IE 10 or Firefox and I don’t want to risk leaving my information on
public computers.

I tried an Excel spreadsheet and then stored the spreadsheet
in the “cloud” but that required me to login in there and keep that up to date,
also. At least with Excel, I could organize the sheets by topic. Word lets me
keep track of things but not sort them. Then I figured OneNote (my 2nd
favorite application) would do the trick. It’s easily searchable, I don’t have
to manually sort things, I can leave notes for myself and it’s available on my
computer, the cloud, my phone, and my tablet. At least Office 2010 lets me synchronize my
results automatically to my computer so that part isn’t such a big job. Then I
thought – why bother keeping them on my computer at all! Why not use an
Internet based solution!

That got me thinking. What is available that is accessible
from anywhere online and easy to keep up-to-date? I thought about my own BLOG –
the one you are reading now – but that’s too cumbersome. I could e-mail myself
lists at my Gmail account but that’s not elegant. I could use one of the free
website builders but that’s tough to keep up-to-date. I cannot be the only one with this issue. Greater minds than
mine must have surely solved this problem already! AHA – Google to the rescue –
AAARGH – there are hundreds of them! Now what!

So I tried a few. I like Delicious.com because it’s been
around for some time and I can browse other bookmark lists that other people
have shared and uncover some additional genealogy links that I would not have
known about, otherwise (over 33000 of them!) Delicious.com also allows me to
TAG bookmarks with categories which is much more powerful than organizing them
into folders. Some bookmarks are useful for multiple categories so TAGGING
makes more sense than duplicating the entries in multiple folders. The search
feature also lets me see other possible TAGS in use.

I also like Diigo.com for its annotations and Android app
but there are fees involved for the full functionality. Diigo also has
extensions for the Chrome browser that let you send parts of pages directly to
your Diigo account with automatic sharing to Facebook, Twitter, etc.

I’ve not made up my mind, yet, which I will stay with but
both of these options are much better than what I was using before.

Kathleen..Talked to friend about your findings,she had used Delicious.com for about 3-4 months. Works good,BUT,she said it slowed down her search engines on computer. You may want to check that angle out! She says,she found easier, to just "google" things in. A thought,but still loads your bookmarks/organizations! Let me know if you hear anymore. Thanks.